I was shadow silent, so swift across the clearing that only Lee startled. Then I was gone, a brindled darkness beneath the heavy branches of a moon-flowered dogwood, the gun in my jaws. I dropped it where the shadows were deepest, buried it with dirt and leaves.

“What was that?” Lee said uneasily. “I saw something.”

“Squirrel, or a rabbit, maybe.” Rob said. “Nothing that matters. Everybody knew we were gonna be here. Nobody’ll mess with us.”

“We will fear no evil, ’cause we are the meanest sons-of-bitches in the valley,” Jeth laughed. Jeth was smart enough, but he was a follower, a perfect mark for Rob’s stronger personality. “Relax, Lee. Have another beer.”

“I saw something, and it wasn’t no damn squirrel,” Lee muttered. He took the beer Jeth tossed him, but his eyes moved uneasily over the shadows. Kinder people in town called Lee “slow.” The more sharp-tongued said his mama had dropped him on his head one too many times. But he wasn’t too stupid to know when he was the brunt of a joke, and he was big enough and strong enough to ensure that people didn’t make fun of him more than once. I thought there was more to him than people gave him credit for. Maybe school gave him trouble, but he trusted his own eyes.

I ghosted around behind them, considering. Maybe I couldn’t make them feel the humiliation ’Rion and I had suffered, but I could give them a taste of the terror we had felt, and the pain. My gift did not carry in my bite. Let them feel my teeth.

I lifted my muzzle and howled, putting into the sound all my rage and all my loss.

The night answered.

One of the wild dog packs, I thought—one of the reasons I was forbidden the forest beyond my Family’s protection. But my throat was full again even as I thought it, vibrating with the strange double harmony of the wolf, that quality that makes a pack of six sound like a score, and a score like a hundred. And again, I was answered.

The boys were cursing steadily now. Rob was scrambling on hands and knees, searching for the gun among the empties and not finding it. Lee had pulled a branch from their small campfire and was thrusting at the shadows shaped by the jumping flame. Jeth gripped a six-inch hunting knife, trying to look everywhere at once. “Dammit, Rob, get the fucking gun!”

“I can’t find it!”

“Rob,” Lee hissed, “we got company.”

Eyes began to shine in the darkness between the trees.

Instinct carried me, a long leap up onto the highest point of the fallen giant oak. My fur bristled to make me look larger, my tail high and bushed as I growled. My place. My prey. Growls answered me, and the pack leaders slipped into the ring of firelight.

There were two of them, Dobermans, tails and ears chopped to stubs. I knew them for dangerous animals. They’d killed pets and food animals, even attacked people, and had evaded several attempts to hunt them down. Once they’d guarded a junkyard. One day the owner had locked the gate and walked away, leaving the two dogs to starve or survive on rats and rainwater. They’d escaped. Half-feral already, before long they led a pack of desperate, discarded hounds and mongrels, turning them as vicious as they were.

The three boys had frozen; if they had run, the feral pack would have given chase. Dogs gone feral are far more dangerous than wild wolves—they’ve learned that without their weapons, men are easy prey. Rob was crouched in the dirt, his right hand clenched on a beer bottle, his face pale and sweating in the wan light. Lee was crouched so close to the fire he was almost in it, and Jeth and his knife were trying to become one with the tree trunk. They weren’t going anywhere.

I jumped down, landing lightly, answering the challenge presented by the Dobermans with a display of size and dominance. They were litter mates who worked as a team, but I was a big wolf, 110 pounds, in good condition and perfect health. They were thin, ridden with parasites and poorly healed wounds.

They were also experienced fighters. They could have torn me to shreds, but they didn’t know that.

I was a born Alpha. I had come into my wolf when I was eleven, at the first breath of puberty, without rite or ritual. Maybe I had never fought in earnest, but my father and grandfather had run with wild wolves, and they had taught me how to bluff.

I skinned my lips back from my teeth, subtly longer and sharper than a natural wolf’s, stretched toes set with claws more like those of a bear than a wolf. Magic sang in my blood. See me! I am terrible and beautiful and wise. Accept me, and my power will be added to yours, and all that runs will fall before us.

The thinner of the Dobermans whined and dropped his head and tail, and then the other. One by one the pack stepped out—bluetick and coonhounds, a shepherd mix, and four of the dingo-like mixes that wild dogs seemed to breed back to—with heads and eyes dropped in submission. A good-sized pack, hunters all—and mine.

I swelled with the knowledge. For tonight, at least, I did have a pack, a pack who knew what it was to hunt and to kill. The Dobermans, I knew, would not hesitate at human prey. They had been headed that way on their own.

One of the Dobermans shifted his eyes behind me, and snarled.

I turned faster than the eye could see. I felt, I knew, that I was all that I had promised the pack. I was beautiful and terrible, my mane a nimbus, my eyes molten, my white teeth gleaming in that wet snarl that promises mayhem. The sight of me fixed Rob to the earth like a beetle pinned to a board, his eyes wide with terror.

The pack began to move, shadows with firelight gleaming in their eyes, closing ranks around me, asking with each movement, with the lips skinned back from yellow teeth, Is this the hunt? Is this the kill?

I stared at Rob, clutching his stupid bottle, and knew he was mine to take.

This is my place! I thought at him. This is my forest. This is my town! You hurt somebody under my protection, somebody good and kind and intelligent. I think you’ll go on hurting people until somebody stops you.

I can stop you. Here. Tonight.

I think I will.

I took a step, one step, and felt the pack tense around me, as if each hunter was an extension of my will. Was this what it was like, to run with the wild ones, to lead the hunt that was life and death? The three who had hurt Orion, who had driven him away, could die, right here, tonight. My tracks would be lost in the tracks of the pack, the tearing of my teeth and claws lost in so many wounds. Even my grandfather would not know, not for sure.

Rob Merrow looked into my eyes, and pissed himself.

“Oh, God,” he moaned. He’d dropped the bottle. His hands were raised in supplication. “Not me. Please. Take them, not me.”

He stank of fear. ’Rion had been afraid, too, had screamed when his arm snapped. But he hadn’t been afraid like this. Not like this.

Was this the bully on whom I had wasted so much hate? He was not worth hunting. Not worth the kill.

The thought shocked me. I hadn’t come here to kill. Had I?

A world without Rob could only be a better place. But Rob and Lee and Jeth were no threat to me, not here and now. It was one thing to kill in immediate defense of myself or of another. But murder was murder, even on four feet.

I couldn’t use this pack, my pack, to work a vengeance that was entirely my own. Maybe it was only a matter of time before the Dobermans, at least, went after a human being. But if I made them kill for me tonight, every person who could carry a gun would be out here, shooting anything on four legs. The wild dogs, too, were mine, like the forest, like the town, and tonight they had come to me of their own will. I owed them better.

And Rob and Lee and Jeth would become martyrs of a sort, their cruelty and their bigotry whitewashed, buried under flowers and candle wax. I owed Orion better than that. I owed myself better.

Stories and movies about werewolves always make the beast the killer. It kills without reason, without remorse, driven by blood lust.

It’s so easy to blame the wolf. But I understood then what the Family chronicles had been trying to teach me. The werewolf is dangerous because the wolf is a weapon—murder without apparent motive, the ultimate misdirection.

Bloodlust is human, not lupine. A wolf kills for food, for territory, or to protect the pack. I wasn’t hungry. The land spoke to me through my flesh and blood, indisputably, forever mine, whether I liked it or not. And murder here would destroy the dog pack, and destroy my grandfather.

The meanest son-of-a-bitch in the school had just wet his pants at the sight of me. It would have to do.

I took a step back and howled. For a moment I felt the pack trembling around me, surprised, perhaps relieved. After a moment I felt them relax. Muzzles lifted, and we sang, voices tumbling over and over the boys who crouched frozen and ignored in the dirt.

Then I turned and lead the pack into the forest, where we ran and hunted the plentiful deer beneath the gibbous moon.

On Monday it seemed at first that the night at the Deadfall had never happened. Rob, Jeth, and Lee were hanging out in the hall as usual, where I’d have to pass them to get to my locker. There was an added opportunity for humiliation because Thomas, a boy I actually liked, was just a little down and across the hallway, stacking books for his morning classes.

On the other hand, I’d seen Rob cowering and terrified. I snugged that image up against me like a shield and continued down the hall.